Determined to bring some joy to this poor creature's existence, Kinsly told the girl he had a surprise for her. Returning to where his team had dropped their rucksacks, he retrieved a roll of caramel candy he had been saving from his rations. Walking back, he hoped that she would be able to chew the sticky candy. His concern was unnecessary. As he neared the tree, he noticed that the girl had not moved since he had left her. Her large, vacant eyes continued to stare unseeing into the distance. Nothing he had experienced before or since haunted Kinsly more than the image of that little girl's body, lifeless and alone. The death of that innocent young girl, more than anything else, summarized the stark despair and bankrupt future the country faced. From that day on, Kinsly stopped volunteering and kept to himself, attempting to survive by isolating himself from everything not connected with the military aspect of his mission.
The operations they conducted as part of Twilight helped. "Twilight" was the name given to raids designed to keep the Ethiopians and their Soviet advisors off balance and reduce their backing of the Sudanese communists. These raids allowed Kinsly to maintain the illusion that he was doing something useful and soldierly, but even they seemed at times to be of questionable value. Though the idea was sound, Kinsly saw no indication that Twilight operations were having any effect. Like every other aspect of his team's mission, these Lilliputian efforts were pinpricks that solved nothing, ended nothing.
In quick succession, explosions ripped open the large fuel tanks, shattering the silence of the night, bringing Kinsly's mind back to the task at hand. Thousands of gallons of burning aviation fuel, spilling out of ruptured containers, bathed the airfield in a shimmering light. Hours of crawling about in the darkness, clearing a lane through a mine field and cutting through two barbed-wire fences, were over. Kinsly didn't need to cue the commander of the Sudanese guerrilla assault team he was with. They were already up and headed for the helicopters parked along the runway in protective revetments. Now it was time for action — quick, violent action.
The colonel who had planned the operation and had given Kinsly's Special Forces A team the mission figured that they had less than twenty minutes from the beginning of the attack before the Ethiopians could muster their ready reaction force and mount an effective counterattack. In that time, the guerrilla band that the A team was working with had to take out some twenty helicopters and six MIG fighters as well as their maintenance facilities and support equipment. The fuel storage tanks and trucks, which served as the trigger for initiation of the attack, were already gone. Barring any unforeseen complications, Kinsly was sure they could do it.
In an instant, Major Grigori Neboatov, senior Soviet advisor to the battalion of infantry guarding the airfield at Gondar, was awake, off his cot, and on the floor. His reactions were not the results of training; they were the instincts of a veteran, a man who had survived in combat living long enough to learn how to survive. He lay on the floor for a moment, motionless and listening. After the initial detonations, there had been a great spasm of automatic and semiautomatic fire in the distance that had lasted five, maybe ten seconds. Then, five seconds of silence. When the shooting started again, it came in random bursts. The echoing gunfire was not from Russian-made weapons. The explosions had not been an accident, and the gunfire was not friendly. They were under attack.
Satisfied that he was in no immediate danger, but not wanting to take any unnecessary chances, Neboatov rolled across the floor to where his clothes and pistol hung on the back of a chair. Fumbling with his clothes, he continued to listen to the sounds of battle outside. There was still no return fire from his people. That meant that the Ethiopian soldiers on duty had been taken out in the initial explosions or in the volley fire that he had heard immediately after the explosions. The enemy, therefore, was there in strength and within the perimeter of the airfield itself.
With pants, boots, and pistol belt on, he pondered his next move. If the enemy had been clever enough to cover and eliminate the troops on duty, they no doubt would have the barracks covered with automatic fire. A burst of machine-gun fire not more than fifty meters from where Neboatov lay confirmed his suspicion. With measured bursts of twenty-five to thirty rounds, the unseen machine gun, sited to cover the front of the troops' and the officers' billets, began to rake the troop billet next to the one where Neboatov and the other officers were. Knowing that the uninsulated wooden walls of his building didn't offer any cover, he decided it was time to move.
In a single bound, Neboatov sprang from the floor, leaping over his cot and through the door of his room, grabbing an AK assault rifle that stood propped next to the door as he went by. Without stopping, he continued across the hall, smashing through the thin wooden door of the room across from his. Once in the room, he flopped back down onto the floor and looked around. The window facing the rear was open, and the Cuban captain, Neboatov's assistant, who occupied the room was gone. Assuming that the Cuban had already made good his exit, Neboatov pushed himself up off the floor and made for the window. Wanting to get out of the dark confines of the building and into the open where he could at least defend himself, he threw himself out of the window head first, hoping as he did so that there wasn't anyone or anything on the other side prepared to bar his way.
As Kinsly and the demolition teams ran, random shots from all about them began to ring out. The Ethiopian Army guards on duty had recovered their wits and were beginning to return fire against the attackers. The odds, however, were momentarily against them. Too few guards had survived the initial fire fight. Those that had were separated and silhouetted against the burning fuel tanks. The attackers, emerging from the darkness, were ready, massed and determined. The Ethiopian guards who managed to fire got off only one or two bursts before they were cut down by the assault team. This process was made even easier for the assault team since many of the guards, rather than dropping to the ground and assuming a good prone position before firing, stood fully exposed while they blazed away into the darkness at their still-unseen assailants. The Ethiopians sealed their own death warrant: this both appalled and pleased Kinsly. Such stupidity, he thought, all but guaranteed his success. Though he saw a couple of the Sudanese soldiers go down, more by sheer accident than by accurate and aimed fire, their loss did not deter the follow-on demolition team. The Sudanese were used to losses and death. They were professional soldiers. It was, and for many of them had been since their birth, a way of life.
Once the assault team, charged with the task of clearing away the guards, had finished that part of its mission, it moved on to prepare to repel the counterattack force. Immediately behind it came the sappers with the demolitions. Kinsly dropped back and joined the sappers. Organized into four three-man teams, they dispersed among the parked aircraft. Each team followed the same procedures; while one man stayed on the ground to provide security, two climbed up onto the aircraft, one on either side. Once up near the aircraft engine, the two men pulled blocks of C-4 plastic explosives, with fifteen-minute delayed-action detonator fuses already stuck into them, out of pouches dangling from their sides. Pulling the cord that initiated the fuse, they stuck the blocks of C-4 into the air intakes of the helicopters' engines and jumped down, and the man who had been standing guard put a big X on the nose of the aircraft with a piece of chalk. The sapper team then ran down the line of aircraft until it found one that did not have a chalked X on its nose. As before, two of the sappers climbed up and went about their work.